Masks and Scars
by Tim C. Girl
Summary: Oliver's moods are like a tide, coming and ebbing, good days and bad. Felicity is becoming his personal moon, directing the flow, a force of nature Oliver can't hide from. One-shot sequel (of sorts) to 'Offhanded Comments'.


_I'm sorry this is so late, and probably not at all what people who asked for a continuation to 'Offhanded Comments' had in mind. I worked on it sporadically for months, eventually decided it wouldn't get any better, and then promptly forgot it on my hard drive – twice. Oops?_

_It's darker than I thought it would be, but it was bound to happen when I decided to address Oliver's scars (I've lived with mine all my life, I can't imagine he goes a single day without thinking about his – you get used to them, sure, but they're always there). Anyway – this is a hybrid between sequel and companion piece, still in the same pre-Undertaking timeframe (mostly because I still haven't seen any of Season 2 yet), and it's probably best to read 'Offhanded Comments' first to see where the characters' mindsets are at._

_Not beta-read, so any mistakes I take full credit for._

* * *

If he's honest with himself, Oliver has to admit that it started as a challenge of sorts.

Well no – before that, it was an apology, because he really _was_ sorry for having implied that Felicity was not "girlfriend material". It was a careless comment, in the heat of an argument with Diggle (he was barely aware that Felicity was within hearing distance), but still unforgivable. Oliver Queen treats women better than that – at least he likes to think he does, nowadays if not _before_.

In any case, Felicity was wrong in assuming he doesn't see her as a woman. He does – he noticed her vitality and her spunk the moment he first stepped into her office with a bullet-ridden laptop and the stupidest cover story known to man. He saw a good-looking woman comfortable in her skin (no one wears those shades of lipstick if they don't want to be noticed!), coupled with a quick mind and a healthy sense of sarcasm. He still doesn't know why she didn't kick him and his poor excuses out long before she learned of his double life. He tends to think her curiosity was stronger than his pretexts.

She _was_ right, however, when she pointed out that she's not _his_ type of woman. Oliver's playboy attitude has always drawn in pretty much the same breed, to be blunt: low self-esteemed, needy girls whom he could dazzle with his wit, his smile, and his money. (Except for Laurel, but Laurel has always been his personal exception that confirms the rule.)

And it so happens that he prefers dark hair.

So yes, he saw it as a challenge to see if the new-and-improved Oliver could make a girl like Felicity – the almost complete opposite of any of his past conquests – fall for his charms. Except that when he says it like that, it sounds incredibly callous and mean, and totally something he would have done on a dare from Tommy when they were in high school.

And this isn't like that. Felicity is dear to him, for more than her computer skills, and he would never want to hurt her on purpose. The small gestures he starts doing for her, like bringing her coffee the way she likes it when he expects them to pull an all-nighter in the basement, or sending flowers as a thank you the next morning, aren't a way to her bed. When he lightly squeezes her upper arm while asking if she's okay, or when he helps her into her jacket at the end of the day, it's innocent, and surprisingly effortless. After five years on the island, he didn't think he'd ever manage to touch anyone again without having to consciously rein in his instincts.

He knows that he's making her uncomfortable on some level. And the flowers were a bit much, he can admit that (although it was worth it to see her punctuation-filled text after his Saturday morning delivery). But she's also opening more to him as a result of his own candour, and he finds himself wanting to see how far he can take it. The challenge isn't in when Felicity will get fed up with him and tell him to leave her alone already, but rather in how long can post-island Oliver act like this with her and not feel like he's putting on a mask the way he does with everyone else in his life. He's proving to himself that the island didn't _completely_ change him, that there's still a chance that someday, when he's done with crossing names off from his father's book, he'll be able to go back to his life. With some not-inconsiderable changes, but still closer to whom he was than to what he's become.

And if it gets him a true friendship with a woman he admires in the meantime, well, he's not going to begrudge himself of it. Diggle was right – he needs people in his life with whom he can be completely honest, if only to balance out all the lies he tells his family and friends. And while Digg himself fills some of that role, Oliver is self-aware enough to know that he craves a feminine presence. One that is guilt-free, to boot.

So yes, at first it's sort of a challenge: to find new ways to compliment Felicity and see her adorable blush, to find out how long he can innocently touch her before his body realises he's doing it and he has to fight his tensing muscles, to see how long she can hold her uncontrolled babbling and unfiltered comments from spewing out. To be _himself_ with one person in his life, and not implode from it.

But one night, Felicity is lost in her thoughts with a preoccupied look on her face that he's pretty sure isn't spurred by their current target, and he thinks he might have overstepped his bounds. The last thing he wants is to push her away with his behaviour. He's enjoyed proving to her that he _does_ see her as a beautiful woman, but he'll tone it down if it'll make her more comfortable. And he tells her so.

He's completely helpless to stop the smile that forms on his lips when her repartee is a blend of sarcasm and a 'you're being an idiot, but an adorable idiot' eye roll. He's finding that he's smiling much more easily these days, and he knows that Felicity has a lot to do with that. He even laughs – a true, full-bellied guffaw – when she sticks her tongue out at him instead of falling into unrestrained babbling after calling him a "gorgeous-looking man".

But it's her good-natured warning that makes him decide to up the ante, so to speak. It's easy to agree to "no more flowers" – he's learned his lesson. But there are _a lot_ of other ways he can show her his appreciation.

"Or any other gifts," she's quick to amend, probably guessing he has something up his sleeve.

She shouldn't have given him the idea.

* * *

He starts small.

Literally – the glasses-wearing blue figurine of Brainy Smurf is barely two inches high, and Felicity doesn't even notice it where Oliver has positioned it near her computer screens. The last few days have been hard – corporate tycoon Amanda Fry's name is in his father's book, and she's made the news lately for planning a hostile takeover that would close down a couple of factories situated in the Glades and mean thousands in job losses. Oliver knows her negotiation methods are a bit on the muscled side (meaning she never goes anywhere without two bodyguards that make even Digg look small), but neither Felicity's hacking nor Oliver and Diggle's recon have turned up anything tangible that would incriminate her. Felicity's vowed to keep searching until she finds something that'll save those jobs from being transferred to third-world countries for a fraction of the cost, which means she's been staying particularly late at night, cursing at her computer network while he keeps her well-caffeinated.

Oliver's patience is at the point where he would make Fry talk at arrow-point and hope she scares easily, but the security of her estate is trickier than anything he's seen before, and Felicity has decreed that it should be a last resort. Something about risks of exposure and not yet being able to wipe human memories as efficiently as security feeds.

All in all, it's been a stressful week, and Oliver hoped to make her smile with his small gift. But she's been typing away at the computers for nearly ninety minutes already, and she has yet to notice the new addition to her desk. He's not sure if he should be affronted or simply write it off as a bad idea and go back to his training routine. At least when he's shirtless he gets a sideways glance or two.

He's just about to turn on his heel and start on the salmon ladder when a surprised "Oh!" finally comes from Felicity's neon-pink lips. She turns in her chair to face him, the blue character standing on her open palm. The smile on her face is full of simple, pure joy, and it brings an answering grin to his lips. She doesn't say anything, but she doesn't have to. He's glad she likes it. After a moment she turns back to her work, and it only takes another hour before she lets out a triumphant cry, heralding her victory.

"She's blackmailing the current owner with pictures he probably doesn't want his wife and kids to find out about," she explains, blushing slightly at the nature of those pictures as she makes them slide onto one of the screens. It's nothing Oliver would get embarrassed over, himself, but then, he hasn't been married for forty years and doesn't have three children and five grandchildren. He can understand the awkwardness.

In the grand scheme of things, he'd rather the man committing very acrobatic adultery but providing Starling City residents with honest-paying jobs get to keep his company. It doesn't mean he won't be paying him a little visit after he's dealt with Fry, though. Even if a big part of him can't help but cringe at being the one to make the man see the error of his ways. By the gleam in Diggle's eyes, Oliver's not the only one seeing the irony.

Felicity doesn't comment, and Oliver is once again amazed by her implicit faith in him. It surely helps that she had never met him before he got stranded on the island, but he's come to expect people to still see the same irresponsible and immature man that he was, and it always surprises him when she doesn't. She expects more, in fact, than what he thinks he's capable of, but she also forgives him his flaws and mistakes. Some days, he doesn't know how he'd manage to stay sane without her.

The second figurine he places next to the first one in front of her keyboard the next evening is his way to thank her for it. This one is the blonde, dress-wearing silhouette of Smurfette, and Oliver wishes he could have somehow merged the two characters into a glasses-wearing blonde look-alike. But he also likes the duality of her girly-half standing next to her genius side. A bit like himself, Felicity has two personae, but she gets to wear them out in the world for all to see, and she balances them much, much better than he does his.

He's upstairs being the club-owner people expect of him when Felicity gets in after her official workday is over, so he doesn't get to see her reaction this time. He knows she caught his meaning, though, when two days later he comes back from doing recon on their next target, and finds the bow-and-arrow-wielding Hunter Smurf and the mirror-holding Vanity Smurf standing proudly on top of the wooden chest he brought back from the island. He's about to make a comment when he catches Digg's expression, the puzzled look not one his friend sports often.

"Why are there small blue toys on my bag?"

Oliver snorts, earning him a playful glare from Felicity while she answers Diggle: "I didn't want you to feel left out." It does nothing to erase the confusion from Digg's face, so Oliver shows him his own little avatars, while not-so-subtly trying to catch a glimpse of the ones Felicity decided would represent the older man best.

He can't stop laughter from bursting past his lips when he catches the heart-and-arrow tattoo on the arm of Hefty Smurf and the red hat of Papa Smurf.

The game is on.

* * *

The problem is, Oliver ends up having to lay low for a while after Detective Lance gets suspicious again from the tip-off on their latest bust (the man just can't quit – it's rather admirable, actually, but it's also inconvenient). It gives him some free time, but it's not a concept he's comfortable with anymore – he doesn't need more time to get sucked into his memories of the island, or brooding about all his past bad choices (Diggle's words).

So he trains. And tries not to think about Laurel, Tommy, and the state of his relationship with them. Or McKenna and how another bad choice of his nearly cost her life. He works on the salmon ladder until his arms and abs burn with the strain and the scars on his shoulders itch so much he wants to scratch the skin right off. He pins so many tennis balls to the wall with arrows that he has to buy another crate-full, and changes the string on the bow twice. He spars with Digg, increasing the tempo until the other man can't keep up and calls for a break, and then lets loose on the training dummy. He exhausts his body until he's one big aching and itching mass so he can get a few hours of blissfully unperturbed sleep, and then starts over the next day.

He knows it's not exactly healthy. It's keeping him in top shape, sure, but he's overdoing it and waking up old aches – and the memories that come with them. He likes to think he's not self-conscious of his scars, that they are the marks of his survival, of the man he became on the island, but he knows that for each puckered, badly-healed incision or burn there is a corresponding psychological wound he got very adept at ignoring, and was never addressed properly. The forced inaction is leaving him with too much time to contemplate those, and his constant effort not to leaves him irascible and downright grumpy.

To add insult to injury, he can't find a new gift idea for Felicity. It's surprisingly difficult to find something that will make her smile, something personal but not too much so. Frankly, by this point he would usually go with jewelry, but he can imagine how that would go – and it's not pretty. So he spends countless hours browsing the Internet for ideas, but his frustration paints everything in a red haze. Everything looks either too tacky or not clever enough.

It takes six days for Felicity to reach her limit of how much bad-tempered billionaire she can stomach. Oliver thinks she's a saint to have lasted so long – even Diggle has found increasingly dubious excuses to disappear from the basement the last couple of nights. Oliver can't blame him for having enough of being used as a punching bag while they wait for Lance to find a new bone to gnaw at.

"Have you found anything, Felicity?" he fairly growls in her direction while hanging upside down from the steel beams, in-between sit-up reps. He knows it's not her fault that the city's criminals are apparently laying low this week, but she volunteered to monitor the chatter on law enforcement channels instead of leaving him alone to brood, and she knew what kind of mood he was in.

"No, Oliver, I haven't found anything," she answers slowly, enunciating each syllable carefully as if speaking to a temperamental two-year-old. "If I had, you'd be the first to know, believe me." Her own frustration is unmistakable in her tone, and he knows he should leave it at that. But he's on edge, and looking for a fight, and apparently, _any_ fight will do.

"Are you sure?" he asks as he lets himself fall to the ground behind her desk. "Did you check every source?" His own voice is gruff and his words clipped, trying to get a rise out of her.

She doesn't bite. Like he said – she's some kind of saint. Instead, she turns her chair to face him, arches an eyebrow in a silent 'are you sure you want to go there?' expression, and takes a deep calming breath. Oliver knows he's lucky she hasn't used her Loud Voice on him so far.

"You know, you're much more pleasant when you're pretending to flirt with me," she says as nonchalantly as she can probably manage.

That stops him in his tracks. "I'm not pretending," he quickly corrects her, surprised by her words, even more by the small pang they cause in his chest. Felicity raises an eyebrow at him, her lips twitching in a badly-concealed smirk, and he realises what he's implied. "And I'm not flirting," he amends, shaking his head at her.

Felicity's smirk has grown into a full-blown smile at his blunder, and she really _is_ beautiful.

Such thoughts are dangerous though, so he diffuses the moment with a rare show of humour: "Since when am I the one with the foot-in-mouth syndrome?" It makes her laugh, creating another twinge under his scars, but it also miraculously cures his bad temper.

The mood is much lighter as he goes back to his training, and it gets even better when Felicity interrupts him a couple of hours later with the news of a new villain to track and find. And to distract Lance with.

* * *

Oliver's high spirits last a few days (during which he finds the ultimate geek website and orders a whole arsenal of merchandise sporting quirky, geeky, and sarcastic slogans, that he then leaves for Felicity to find in odd nooks and crannies in the basement), until he runs into Tommy upstairs as he's coming in for a sparring session with Diggle. They don't say much, but that in itself says a lot. His best friend can't even look him in the eye anymore, and Oliver can't really fault him for it.

When Felicity gets in a few hours later, she immediately knows that something happened. He doesn't know how she does it, exactly, but somehow, in the months since she started helping him, she's become incredibly attuned to his temper. Some days, he feels like he's wearing one of those colour-changing 'mood rings' the girls wore in high school. His would definitely be mostly black.

She doesn't outright ask him if he wants to talk about it, but instead of going straight to her desk and turning her full attention to whatever programs she's got constantly running on the computers, she drags a stool to the workbench where Oliver is working on his arrows (because Diggle called "uncle" when he realised what kind of mood Oliver was in, and the dummy is still broken). Felicity perches on the stool right next to him, crosses her legs (Oliver tries not to stare as her skirt rides up her thighs, he really does), and leans an elbow on the table, tilting her head to try to catch his gaze.

For a girl who can't stop babbling most of the time, she's incredibly gifted in the 'silent stare' department. Oliver wonders briefly if she's learned it from him, except he knows he doesn't have that small smile she has on her brightly coloured lips when he does it. In the end, he folds within a couple of minutes, because ignoring her is impossible and he doesn't want her mad at him as well.

So he puts the arrow he's been working on down, and turns fully towards her, their knees brushing at the movement. He holds her gaze, but doesn't say anything – he's in the kind of mood where if he starts talking, he won't stop, but he wouldn't even know where to start, and truth be told, Felicity shouldn't have to hear any of what's preying on his mind. She's not as innocent as she looks, he knows that, but still… his scars are too ugly to share with a beautiful woman like her. He doesn't wear a mask around her, but that's as far as he's willing to go. For now, anyway.

Felicity seems to understand he's not going to say anything, and after a long beat, she smiles fully and reaches over to kiss his cheek, leaving a smudge of lipstick if her embarrassed mumble and thumb swiping is any indication. It makes him smile, if very slightly, but she catches it and winks.

Jumping off her perch, she puts a hand on his forearm, squeezing lightly in an imitation of his own comforting gesture, before declaring that since he seems to have scared Diggle away, he's going to have to replace him. "We were supposed to spar – well, Digg was supposed to gently throw me around on the mats for an hour or so. Still, I actually managed to stay up for more than ten seconds the last time, so I guess it's an improvement, and you look like you need to burn off some steam. Not that I think I'll be any sort of challenge, and come to think of it, please don't hurt me?"

He chuckles at the meek tone of her voice at the end of that sentence, but agrees to run through some of the self-defence moves Digg's shown her. "I'll be gentle," he teases her. He's rewarded by another smile, and when she gets changed, by the sight of her in the 'No, I will not fix your computer' t-shirt he gave her after the Smurfs. She'd laughed out loud when she'd found it draped over her gym bag, thanking him for the reminder of what she _should_ have said in their first meeting, and every time she wears it for a session on the mats, it feels like their own little inside joke, a connection he doesn't have with anyone else.

Maybe, one day, he reflects as he leans down to help Felicity up from the mat after tripping her for the tenth time, smiling as she bats his hand away and mock-scowls at him, a rueful grin still on her lips despite her increasing annoyance, maybe he'll strengthen that connection by letting her in, by giving her a look at those scars. If anyone can put a balm on them and help him heal, Oliver thinks, it's someone like her, full of colours and energy.

And spunk, he mentally adds when she manages to surprise-tackle him, making him fall on his butt. Their laughter echoes in the basement for several minutes.

* * *

_I haven't watched an Arrow episode in several months, and I have very little knowledge of season 2, so I apologise if the characterisation is way off. I tried to stay in line with the first piece at least…_

_Thanks for reading – reviews are always appreciated (and feed the author's ego, which is pretty much starving these days)._


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